Jazz Maia on the Illusion of Duality

This made me think a bit harder about identity and separateness. My comment:

Your remark about personal identity being necessary, and your earlier one about our personal identity being a construction reminded me of something that happened a couple of months ago. I passed out and evidently collapsed onto the floor, but I had no recollection of actually falling. Someone "woke me up" and as I became aware of this person talking to be, I felt as though I had been dragged away from a place of complete calm and comfort, into a world of pain and nausea with blood on the floor where I had apparently hit my head. The relevance to your remark is that it is actually our physical existence as healthy living organisms that lies at the root of that identity. Not just our ability to recall events in our past, which is a large part of our idea about what we really are, but the physiological memories that we carry completely unconsciously. As it happens I had a pulmonary thrombosis which caused pulmonary hypertension and this was a result of blood clots in my left leg which moved up and were trapped in my lungs. Years and years ago I had a thrombosis in that same leg, which was quite disabling, so this was probably connected and part of the unconscious physiological memory might have been my body responding to being at 10,000 feet above sea level again. So I think we have identities at various levels. Aristotle might have said at three levels: our genetic identities, our animal/physiological identities and our rational identities. At all of these levels the identities of different individuals are actually interdependent, and there is a vertical interconnection in the sense we require the rational identity before we can actually abstract the ideas of the genetic and physiological ones.

See also James Corbett on Cybernetics. 

Here's her video about nihilism which I somehow missed:

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